Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

Oh the things I do when I'm avoiding doing art.

• Make beef and tomato soup (Saturday afternoon)
• Change my bed linens (Friday evening)
• Play with cats (every day)
• Play on Facebook (every day)
• Housecleaning (every day)

And the list goes on and on.  I'm sure every artist has avoidance tactics.  Actually, most people have avoidance tactics for anything they don't want to do, are afraid to do or...  For me, it's mostly fear of the blank page, of screwing up, and so on.  I've talked about it here many times.  However, I have managed to create a couple of journal pages - not complete projects - over the past few days, and here they are:


This set of pages came about when I decided to stop avoiding things and actually work on painting.  Rather than do my usual mixing, I used colors straight from the tube and just layered them on.  I wanted to say something about my being afraid to break free from 'rules' when it comes to making art, and I decided to make a Victorian lady say what I was thinking.  I covered her face with a piece of Magic Mesh (a sticky kind of mesh paper) to imply that she was imprisoned.  Not sure that yellow was the right choice, but it's done.

The other page on this spread involves a sweet old lady (I am assuming she's sweet) who firmly believes she's royalty.  Heck - she's got a crown!

The other set of pages started out as an experiment.  This time I did play around with mixing colors and came up with a couple of different greens.  I then decided to use the paint as fixative to put some very delicate white mesh paper on the pages.  It didn't quite come out as I wanted, and I was rather disgusted with the results.

So I made things 'worse' by playing with geometrics.  One page came out OK, I think, but I am regretting the little tiny dot in the circles on the other page - reminds me of nipples, I think.  Part of the problem was that I couldn't find the right size hole punch, and made do with the tiny punch.  Mistake!

Wait - there are no mistakes in art.  Only things you might not want to do again.  

How do you waste time?

later,
lin